Tag Archives: Elizabeth Costello

In one of Franz Kafka’s short stories, titled ‘A Report to an Academy’, an ape nick-named Red Peter tells his story to an assembly of intellectual dignitaries: how he was shot and caged in West Africa, then shipped to Europe, and how he managed to find there, if not freedom, at least a “way out” of his captivity by becoming a performing animal, a human impersonator, on the vaudeville circuit. The description of Red Peter’s laborious and finally successful attempts to turn himself into a sort of human make an uncomfortably satiric fable. It’s usually understood as telling the story of Jewish assimilation into Western culture: reasonably enough, since Kafka was himself Jewish, and the story was first published in the journal Die Jude. It might also be read as the sacrifices which an artist may have to make to fit into a society made by Philistines, or more generally as the transformation of the Freudian child into the socialized adult.

But that’s not how Red Peter is understood when he turns up in a more recent address to an academy, the one given by the fictitious novelist Elizabeth Costello to the academics of Appleton College in J.M.Coetzee’s story The Lives of Animals (itself originally delivered as an address to an academy, in the form of the Tanner Lectures at Princeton University, 1997-8). Costello starts her discourse by telling her audience that as she stands in front of them she feels “a little like Red Peter myself”. But in case they should take this for self-deprecating good humour, “a light-hearted remark, meant to set you at ease”, she bleakly insists on its literalism: “It means what it says. I say what I mean.” And likewise she will not be interpreting Red Peter in good academic style as the artist obliged to please in order to live or, say, as the woman making her way in a world fashioned by men. For again she corrects the academic habit of abstraction: “I have a literal cast of mind . . . When Kafka writes about an ape, I take him to be talking in the first place about an ape.”

What then does Red Peter mean strictly as an ape, and an ape who, so far from standing in for a human (for the Jew, for the artist), is himself now apparently being stood in for, at Appleton College, by a distinguished old lady, Elizabeth Costello?

In the same year in which Kafka’s short story appeared, 1917, the psychologist Wolfgang Köhler had published The Mentality of Apes, an account of his work with chimpanzees at a research station on the island of Tenerife. Like Red Peter, so Costello says, Köhler’s apes “underwent a period of training intended to humanize them”, which included the setting of various problems or difficulties for the chimpanzees to solve in order to get at their food. You note that word “training”. Costello speaks of “what the apes on Tenerife learned from their master”, and of the most adept of them, named Sultan, “beginning to see how the man’s mind works”. Köhler’s research was not, then, aimed at understanding the ape-mind as it naturally is; rather the aim was to see how nearly it could be induced to work like a man’s. His title might more accurately have been The Mentality of Humans.

That, at any rate, is how Elizabeth Costello reads the book – a book which she in fact suggests Kafka himself had read before writing ‘Report to an Academy’. She analyzes Köhler’s experiments thus: “As long as Sultan continues to think wrong thoughts [i.e. not puzzle-solving thoughts], he is starved . . . At every turn Sultan is driven to think the less interesting thought . . . he is relentlessly propelled towards lower, practical, instrumental reason.” And this is indeed how Red Peter has earned his own food, his means to live comfortably: by imitating the behaviour of humans (spitting, drinking, or shaking hands, according to the models available) and deliberately relinquishing his ape heritage. “I can no longer attain,” he says, “the old apish truth.”

So Elizabeth Costello sets the story of Red Peter in the context of animal research, and of the stripped-down version of the animal which is all that is useful or even intelligible to it. (Thus Oxford’s Professor Burdon Sanderson in 1876: “The study of the life of plants and animals is in a very large measure an affair of measurement.”) For all Red Peter’s rather ghastly self-satisfaction (part of being ‘human’, perhaps), he is no more than anthropological evidence for his attentive academicians, as he is no more than a ‘turn’ for his vaudeville audiences. And for this acceptance into the human circle, “what has he had to give up?” asks Costello. A painful defeat has been involved.

But there is also a much larger context of defeat to the story. That human mentality, in favour of which Red Peter has foregone his own “apish truth”, has in fact overshadowed the whole kingdom of animals. “In the olden days,” says Costello (the fairy-tale phrase suggesting that she’s not proposing to speak the language of “reason” herself),

the voice of man, raised in reason, was confronted by the roar of the lion, the bellow of the bull. Man went to war with the lion and the bull, and after many generations won that war definitively . . . Animals have only their silence left to confront us. Generation after generation, heroically, our captives refuse to speak to us.

Except Red Peter, that is. And in him we can see how humans have indeed made themselves and their “reason” the measure of the world: he can only be understood, only respected and allowed out of captivity, as a quasi-human, a plucky runner-up in life’s race. That’s why in fact he admits, right at the beginning of his address, that he can tell his audience nothing about the life of an ape. All that he now knows of it, they already know: he is, after all, their creation.

So it’s the tragic character of this defeat, this loss of the animal voice and share in the world, that Elizabeth Costello means to represent to her Appleton audience when she tells them that she feels like Red Peter. For all his grotesquely humanoid manners, Red Peter is, she says, “a branded, marked, wounded animal presenting himself as speaking testimony to a gathering of scholars.” And just so is she, “an animal exhibiting, yet not exhibiting, to a gathering of scholars, a wound, which I cover up under my clothes but touch on in every word I speak.” Red Peter’s wound (he sometimes shows it to his audiences) is the one made by the rifle which brought him down and hustled him into the human world: it’s the record or scar of his humanization. Elizabeth Costello’s is the converse of that: it is her heritage as an animal, her share in Red Peter’s wound and in all the wounds which modern life inflicts upon non-human animals.

But she has to remind her audience that it isn’t she alone who has this heritage: “we are all animals”. Accordingly she insists that we all do have (contrary to what the philosopher Thomas Nagel has argued), the capacity to understand other animals as they really are, and the duty therefore to compassionate them: “I can think my way into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being with whom I share the substrate of life.” It is not just a case of imaginative sympathy, although Costello does indeed urge the Appleton scholars to use and trust this faculty: “open your heart and listen to what your heart says.” (The scholars are “nonplussed” by this emotional appeal.) It’s also a matter of fact: there really is that “substrate of life” which we share with all living things. Without it, we could not have come into existence as a species. Red Peter himself impishly reminds his academicians of it, when he refers to “your own apehood, gentlemen, to the extent that there is anything like that in your past”.

And now we can appreciate better the story that Kafka’s Red Peter, understood not as a Jew or an artist but literally as an ape, is telling: it’s the story of human evolution, and of our misuse of it. Red Peter is both the first and the last man: the first as, struggling out of his former species, he becomes human; the latest, as he pulls up the ladder, forgetting his ape-life, speaking scornfully of his former species, keeping a miserable “half-trained chimpanzee” as a sort of concubine but shunning her during the day. Just so has humanity pulled up the ladder connecting it to all that “substrate of life” from which it emerged. What impoverishment has been involved is suggested in the superficial tricks and manners which constitute Red Peter’s humanity. In Coetzee’s story, it is suggested also in the discomfort of the Appleton minds, their awkward inadequacy in facing Elizabeth Costello’s unhappy passion, her “wound”.

But of course there is a worse impoverishment entailed for the animals themselves. That wound, metaphorical in her case, is horribly factual in the case of the real animals whose lives, “all around us as I speak”, are circulating in the modern world’s “enterprise of degradation, cruelty and killing . . . an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them”. Their story, implicit in Kafka’s sardonic fable, is presented to the academy by Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello in plain light as the human and animal tragedy it is.

Notes and references:

Quotations from ‘A Report to an Academy’ are as translated by Stanley Applebaum in The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, Dover Publications 1996, pp.81-88.

J.M.Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals later became ‘Lesson 4’ in the novel Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons, which is the text from which the quotations above are taken (Vintage Books 2004, pp.91-115). There’s more about Coetzee and Lives of Animals on the VERO web-site here: http://www.vero.org.uk/matthewsimpson2.pdf

Professor Burdon Sanderson is quoted from a lecture published in the journal Nature, 1876, vol.14, pp.117. The painting Science is Measurement (1879) by Henry Stacy Marks is said (by Terrie Romano in Making Medicine Scientific Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002, p.127) to have been inspired, at least as to its title, by Burdon Sanderson’s lecture. It belongs in the collection of the Royal Academy of Arts, London.

John Bradshaw’s book The Animals Among Us (2017) ends with a scene at his five-year-old grand-daughter’s school, where the children are delighted to find that what they had left the previous day as a clutch of hen’s eggs has turned into eight live chicks. The author says “a fascination with animals was kindled in Beatrice’s mind that day”, and goes on to draw the moral, which is implicitly the moral of the whole book:

Her generation will have to stabilize the ecology of the planet for their own survival. Why would they want to do this without knowing the reality of animals, both pets and wild?”

Actually the chicks have been hatched in the school’s incubator, so perhaps “reality” isn’t the right word. But then the book is mainly a history and anthropology of pet-keeping, and although the title of this last chapter is ‘Animals Maketh Man’, the story it finishes has been mainly about what humans have made of animals, for good and ill (predominantly good, so Bradshaw believes, and one review of the book quite accurately calls it a “celebration of pets”).

You can see that it’s a book with a personal touch to it, a popular book then, but popular science: in fact its sub-title is The New Science of Anthrozoology. As the book (and its cover) make obvious, Bradshaw regards this new science as essentially about our “personal relationships” with animals, therefore about why and how we keep pets. And he ought to know, because he was one of the coiners of the name and founders of the International Society for Anthrozoology (ISAZ) in 1991. However, even ISAZ doesn’t quite agree with him, defining the science more broadly as “the interactions between human and non-human animals”. And it’s a version of that definition which the Oxford English Dictionary prefers: “The multidisciplinary study of the interaction between humans and other animals”. By way of illustration, the Dictionary quotes another popular introduction to the subject, Hal Herzog’s Some We Love, Some we Hate, Some We Eat (2010): “Anthrozoology is a big tent. It includes the study of nearly all aspects of our interactions with other species.”

The wider the scope of this new academic discipline, if that’s what it is, the more its attitudes matter. Herzog not only gives it a very large scope, but goes some way to fix its attitudes, for his book has been a notable success, enthusiastically reviewed (“Read this book, read it again, and share it widely. It is that important.” – Mark Bekoff), and also much cited. Steven Pinker’s discussion on animal welfare in The Better Angels of Our Nature (reviewed in this blog on 25 May) has Herzog in 14 of its 64 footnotes. John Bradshaw himself calls the book “seminal”, and his own has clearly been influenced by it.

Herzog is an academic psychologist, but he writes his book as a genial guide and roving interviewer. The book is full of journeys to meet people, of drinks, meals, and chats, but yes, people: Carolyn, Staci (“forty-one but looks ten years younger”), Sam, Becky (“she loves animals. She really does.”), Bobo, Pam, Fabe (“a legend among western North Carolina cockfighters”). There are animals too, of course, some of them with names, but mostly too numerous and out of focus for that, and interesting not for themselves but as dramatizing these human personalities. Well, it’s there in the title of the book: the animals are the vaguely specified point of reference, but it’s the people, “we” (the key word in the book, perhaps in the science), who govern those intriguingly contradictory verbs: we’re the mystery, then. And the publisher’s summary makes the same point: “this enlightening and provocative book will forever change the way we look at our relationships with other creatures and, ultimately, how we see ourselves.”

So when anthrozoologists have us looking at animals and our treatment of them, we’re really looking into the mirror yet again, getting, as Herzog says, “an unusual glimpse into human nature” [35]. It’s a point likewise implied throughout John Bradshaw’s book (even though he’s a biologist by training), and often enough made explicit: pet-keeping “provides insight into what makes us human”, and “is one way of expressing what it means to be human.”

For Bradshaw it’s really an anthropological point: modern pet-keeping is the latter end of a long history of dealings with animals which have helped to make human communities successful. For Herzog, naturally enough, it’s the human psyche which makes it all so interesting. And not just the variety of attitudes between Carolyn, Bobo, Fabe, and the rest, but the variety within any one person’s attitudes. Hence his sub-title: why it’s so hard to think straight about animals.

It’s true that he occasionally suggests that we’re on our way somewhere: “our beliefs about how we should treat other species are changing.” He even says that anthrozoologists “hope that our research might make the lives of animals better.” [17] But mainly it’s the inconsistency that fascinates him. For instance, there’s “the moral ambiguity of the human-meat relationship”. He finds this ambiguity well identified by Staci, with whom he shares a meal of raw home-raised steak (“I ask for seconds.”). Staci says “It’s amazing how complex our psyches must be in order to nurture creatures every day for seven months, only to have them sent away and then come home in little freezer packages.” [203]

Herzog looks for complexity of this sort wherever he goes – and finds it, of course, or seems to. He sees it, for instance, in a research laboratory, where the mice being used in experiments are “cared for by a competent and fully certified staff” [220] but, if they should escape, at once join the category ‘pest’ and are ruthlessly trapped and killed. (Is there really any contradiction or even paradox here?) And still on the theme of research animals – to whom he devotes a chapter, ‘The Moral Status of Mice’ – Herzog quizzes animal advocates like Jonathan Balcombe and Marc Bekoff on their willingness to use, when making their claims for the sensibilities of animals, evidence derived from the sort of animal research which they would like to prohibit. He concludes that “reason can be elusive in the debate over animal research.” [234]

In fact that’s his conclusion on all the varieties of human/animal relations which he views in the book. His last chapter is titled ‘The Carnivorous Yahoo within Ourselves’. It’s a quotation from J.M.Coetzee’s fiction The Lives of Animals (1999), which describes the experiences of a novelist, Elizabeth Costello, as visiting lecturer at a university, her chosen subject the animal holocaust (her term for it). Shouldn’t we accept ourselves as we are, one questioner asks her: “Is it not more human [there it is again] to accept our own humanity – even if it means embracing the carnivorous yahoo within ourselves?” Implicitly, Herzog’s answer is yes. “What the new science of anthrozoology reveals”, he says on his last page, “is that our attitudes, behaviours, and relationships with the animals in our lives . . . are more complicated than we thought.” But the confusions needn’t be deplored or apologised for: “they are inevitable. And they show we are human.” As you were, then; or rather, as you are, for by the end of Herzog’s book, the habitual present tense (even at such moments as “I ask for seconds”) carries a momentum of acceptance and validation. It’s what humans just are like – and how interesting with it!

Hal Herzog is a good-humoured observer, with a sympathetic and knowledgeable interest in non-human animals, though a much greater one in humans. His book is full of information as well as chat, and although it doesn’t ever quite answer that set question, why it’s so hard to think straight about animals, he at least shows clearly enough that most people don’t succeed. Still, he may have been unwise to evoke the ghost of Elizabeth Costello in his last chapter. It’s not just that her answer to the Yahoo question is so much more searching than his own (there isn’t space here to talk about that). As Coetzee presents her, Elizabeth Costello doesn’t just lecture on, she publicly suffers, this subject. She calls it a “wound” and speaks accordingly, without jokes or flourishes, without geniality. She refuses almost discourteously to be made a personality of (a Becky or a Fabe) by the assembled academics, and thereby to turn the problem into an intriguing aspect of herself and take it away with her when she goes. In short, she makes Herzog’s treatment of the subject, and anthrozoology itself, seem jaunty and superficial, a human self-indulgence.

Nevertheless, Anthrozoology lives and grows. In particular it’s a rising subject in universities, where likewise it seems to be essentially anthropocentric. Here are a few of the inducements offered to potential students:

“At its core, the field of anthrozoology is about helping people live better lives.”

“Welcome to Anthrozoology! Are you interested in learning more about the significance of animals in our lives?”

“The MA in Anthrozoology will be of interest to anyone who would like to investigate the many and varied ways in which humans perceive, engage, compete and co-exist with non-human animals in a range of cultural contexts.”

It seems that the ISAZ journal Anthrozoös takes the same point of view, habitually concerned with human attitudes or more generally with the human part in the relationship. To celebrate its 30th anniversary, the journal recently made available online its “top 30” articles (ranked by downloads and citations). Of these, sixteen have to do with the therapeutic possibilities of animals; at least six are about human attitudes and ‘perceptions’; only three show interest in the experiences of the animals themselves.

So? Other journals, other academic disciplines, are free to study whatever’s missing from this new ‘science’, and have of course been steadily doing so: philosophy, for instance, women’s studies, literature. But the name ‘anthrozoology’ makes a claim which either misrepresents what it does or misrepresents the subject itself. As promoted and practised, it’s simply a branch of anthropology or perhaps sociology, the study of man by an interested party, and should be called by its right name.

Meanwhile, a study of “human-wildlife interactions”, featured recently in the journal Science, indicates how much there is to learn about the animal part in the relationship. Under the heading ‘Animals feel safer from humans in the dark’, the journal reports that the human presence is obliging other animals not only to give up land, but also to give way temporally and live by night rather than by day: “nocturnality is a universal behavioral adaptation of wildlife in response to humans.” This change in behaviour entails abandoning “natural patterns of activity, with consequences for fitness, population persistence, community interactions, and evolution.” We may miss the affable style of Bradshaw and Herzog, but that’s what I call anthrozoology: not just humans looking at themselves anew in the animals they happen to keep, use or eat, but the whole world of animal life (zoology) and what the human element (‘anthro-‘, or properly ‘anthropo-‘) shunts it into doing.

Notes and references:

The Animals Among Us: the New Science of Anthrozoology is published in USA by Basic Books (2017) and in the UK by Allen Lane (2017) and Penguin Books (2018). The quotations come from this latter edition, pp. 310, xii, ix, and 21.

Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: why it’s so hard to think straight about animals is published by Harper, 2010 (p/b 2011). Page numbers for quotations are given in the text.

Coetzee’s short fiction The Lives of Animals was subsequently incorporated as chapters 3 and 4 of the novel Elizabeth Costello (2003) and the quotation is from pp.100-101 of the edition of that novel published by Vintage in 2004.

The advertised courses in anthrozoology are at Carrol College (Montana), Exeter University (UK), and the University of Windsor in Canada.

The article ‘The Influence of Human Disturbance on Wildlife Nocturnality’ is published in Science, 15 June 2018, vol.360, pp.1232-35. A brief report about it by a staff writer under the quoted title appears on pp.1185-86. Quotations are from both texts.

A report entitled ‘Normalizing the Unthinkable: the Ethics of Using Animals in Research’, and published online by the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, was the subject of the third post in this blog (1 August 2015, ‘The Complete Vivisector’). The report has now been published in book form, edited by Andrew and Clair Linzey. I’ve re-read it, and I find it as good as it seemed the first time: a complete survey (though tending to concentrate on the situation in the U.K.), thoroughly lucid and readable, surely the best all-round account of this unpleasant subject there is.

The book version adds, to the original report, a new general introduction and some supplementary essays (rather a miscellany, I feel) by scholars and activists, which together account for about as many pages as the report itself. The introduction is headed ‘Oxford: the Home of Controversy about Animals’. It’s a fair title: not a glorious one, perhaps, since Oxford has first of all been the ‘home’ of vivisection, and the controversy has largely followed on from that; but an honourable title, because it shows that there have always been actively high-principled people, in the University and beyond, to object to this betrayal of what the University might stand for, or at least to insist publicly that there are profound moral questions involved. This last is the very least of what ought to be publicly acknowledged – and it was indeed acknowledged during the nineteenth-century phase of the controversy by the leader of medical science at Oxford, Professor Henry Acland, not otherwise an opponent of vivisection. He saw in it, with explicit unease, “a new phase of modern thought … part of a great moral and intellectual question bearing on the very foundation of human society”.

His close friend John Ruskin was more absolute on the subject, of course. There has always been some doubt about why Ruskin resigned his chair in Fine Art. He was certainly ailing at the time, and had possibly become unfit for the hard work of lecturing as he practised it (i.e. with great earnestness and theatricality). However, he himself did not believe so, and he unhesitatingly gave as his reason the University’s decision in 1885 to fund a laboratory where vivisection would be used. More than that, he then spoke about his work as professor of Fine Art at the University since 1869, and the work he had been intending to do in the future (for he had “meant to die in my harness there”), in such as way as to say that the laboratory had nullified it all. His whole art project at Oxford University then, which quite apart from his own high ambitions as to its value had become a phenomenon of the University’s intellectual life probably never since matched for excitement and acclamation, he thus expressly made a casualty of this new scientific practice. It was the opposite of a dedication, reflecting his belief that the new laboratory represented the opposite of what a university should teach and be.

The introduction to the new book gives some account of these and other historical protests in Oxford. It touches rather more briefly on the campaign against the very recently built laboratory (oddly dating the campaign at 2006 although even at its full strength it lasted for several years, and it continues today). And the account concludes thus: “The campaign in opposition failed. The new Oxford lab was built.” Well yes, in that particular objective it did fail, just as the 1880s campaign had failed (that lab was built too) – just as, indeed, the book itself may be said to have failed if it doesn’t bring the practice of animal research to an end by the time it goes out of print. But in fact we know that the book’s ideas will spread outward and endure, just as the story of Ruskin and those University convulsions of the 1880s endures. And here is some of what the modern campaign achieved.

Most essentially, the campaign made manifest in modern Oxford what Henry Acland had acknowledged, the moral momentousness of the decision being taken by the University: the decision, that is, to build animal research into its long-term future. When Elizabeth Costello, in J.M.Coetzee’s novel of that name, speaks to a university audience about the slaughterhouses at work in the vicinity, unseen and unacknowledged, she concludes sardonically, “We can do anything, it seems, and come away clean.” This, Oxford University would indeed have liked to do but was prevented from doing. For a time, demonstrations and rallies came to characterize the city, made all the more conspicuous by the presence (often grossly over-numerous) of police officers with their alarmist cameras and high-visibility jackets. The University’s ceremonial events in particular were trailed, like a bad conscience, by demonstrators and their banners. And the scenery itself, even without the people, came to be expressive. For a year and more, the new laboratory was halted half-built, an ugly skeleton announcing itself along one of the city’s main thoroughfares. Around it, painted lines marked the limits set by court injunctions as to where protesters might go. Even now, notices of these injunctions are pinned to the trees outside the laboratory: not irrelevantly, because the demonstrations continue in that place today, but they’re also important documents, advertising to a multitude of passers-by every day the cause they were aimed at.

With the new awareness of animal research which was thus gifted to the town and University came the debate properly due to this subject. It was forced upon the University by activists, but of course it should have been promoted by the University itself, as an intellectual institution preparing to implicate all its thousands of members in a renewed commitment to a practice that some of them must certainly have deplored. (I don’t want to sound naïve by calling the University also a moral or even spiritual institution, although its own motto does claim or solicit divine guidance.) That it did not promote or even facilitate the debate is a reminder of how little the University really does exist as one institution with any coherent aim other than growth and reputational success. Such unitary voice as it has is mainly synthesized by fund-raisers and PR people speaking on its behalf; otherwise it’s really a congeries of discrete subjects, professions, and careers, careful not to tread on each other’s ground. This was already a concern for Ruskin. He hoped to make his own art school a harmonising force, and indeed made himself unpopular with other professors by freely expatiating on their subjects in his own lectures (in fact on “every subject on earth but the subject of his chair”, as one contemporary complained). The progressive atomizing of the university is no doubt largely what prevented its senior membership from playing any collective part in the modern controversy, of the sort it certainly had played, on both sides, in the controversy of the 1880s.

Anyway, the debate did occur, and in many different ways, formal and informal, from televised set-pieces, through talks and seminars, to ‘vocalizations’ (I use the preferred physiologist’s term) of all kinds in the streets. And crucially, the audiences and participants included science students, who were encountering animal ethics for once not just as a possible branch of their professional training – another ‘module’ to pass an exam in – but as a decision of very great consequence to be made about human nature in themselves and in general.

“Where is your moral teaching in science?” So the politician Tony Benn asked the scientist Richard Dawkins (both of them Oxford graduates) during an interview. Repeatedly in the history of vivisection (including human vivisection), sudden light has revealed scientists insouciantly doing what astonishes and scandalizes their lay contemporaries. It’s really how the anti-vivisection movement began in the U.K., when outsiders to the profession were given an unintended view of the contents of the 1873 Handbook for the Physiological Laboratory. The recent news story about testing diesel exhaust on monkeys is another such occasion. Two of the supplementary essays in the Linzey book touch on this question of the morally unschooled science-mind. One of them, ‘Is “Necessity” a Useful Concept in Animal Research Ethics?’, shows how that slippery concept is used by the research community and its apologists as a sort of alibi or substitute for real ethical attention. The other, Katy Taylor’s excellent study of the utilitarian calculus, ‘Harms versus Benefits’, considers (sceptically) the notion that doing these calculations (in so far as they are done, or even can be), at least gets researchers “to simply consider the ethics of what they are doing.”

It’s a problem which will assume ever more urgency as science grows in scope and authority. Certainly it can’t be solved simply by direct action, but at least for the fourteen years to date of the Oxford campaign, no-one using the University’s science area can have been unaware of the existence of moral values more ambitious than their own or at least than their institution’s. The years of banners, whistles, amplified commentary, crowds, vigils, earnest human attention, have made sure of that.

Yes, direct action may pass into illegality, in a way that lectures and formal debates almost never do. In fact the tactics of the police and of the University’s security service were almost certainly designed to make anything done on behalf of the animal cause outdoors look illegal in itself, or likely to be illegal at any moment. And this is no doubt largely why the introduction to the Linzeys’ book hurries rather briefly over the modern phase of the Oxford controversy; why also, though it kindly mentions VERO (and I hope that VERO has indeed played a worthwhile part in the story), it does not mention by name the group which initiated, orchestrated, and led the most active of the protests throughout, and is still there on the street making the case against vivisection outside the new laboratory: that is, SPEAK, ‘the voice for the rights of animals’.

This blog has already covered the subject of law-breaking (15 January 2016, ‘In Prison, and You Visited Me’). I shall only say here that in the anniversary year of the Representation of the People Act 1918, when the suffragettes are being remembered with admiration and gratitude, I don’t hear it said that their criminal offences against property discredited the cause or the women’s reputations. It was said very often at the time, as it is said now about animal rights militancy. Well, let us wait until the animal cause too is won and has become orthodoxy; then we can more confidently decide what we think about the people who took its risks and paid its penalties.

Notes and references:

The Ethical Case against Animal Experiments, edited by Andrew Linzey and Clair Linzey, is published by University of Illinois Press, 2018. Quotations are from pp.2 & 149.

The quotation from Henry Acland is part of the evidence he gave to the Royal Commission of 1875-6: see Report of the Royal Commission on the practice of subjecting live animals to experiments for scientific purposes, HMSO, 1876, pp.47-8. The Ruskin quotation is from his letter to the Pall Mall Gazette explaining his resignation, reprinted in the Works, ed. Cook and Wedderburn, George Allen, 1903-12, vol.33, p.lvi. The comment on his lecturing was made by the historian J.R.Green in the Saturday Review in 1870, reprinted in his Oxford Studies, Macmillan, 1901 (p.265).

J.M.Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello is quoted from the Vintage edition of 2004, p.80. Chapters 3 and 4 of this novel recount Elizabeth Costello’s experiences as a visiting lecturer speaking about the rights and sufferings of animals. It’s a brilliant and profound piece of writing.

The illustrations show a demonstration in Broad Street (note the tourist bus viewing the principal sights of Oxford), an injunction notice outside the laboratory in South Parks Road (the cameras seen on the left followed me as I took this photograph), and a rally at the Mansfield Road side of the laboratory (this photo by Paul Freestone).

This blog’s review of ‘Normalizing the Unthinkable’ can be read here: https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2015/08/01/the-complete-vivisector/

The post about law-breaking, ‘In Prison, and You Visited Me’, is here: https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2016/01/15/in-prison-and-you-visited-me/